In this article I attempt to contribute to the development of foundations for a sociological theory of economic action. Such a theory, it is argued here, has to make a substantial break with the teleological structure that informs both rational actor theory and normative theories of action....

In the last three decades, the American health care system has undergone revolutionary change. What was for much of the 20th century a cottage industry dominated by a monopolizing medical profession is now a sprawling, price-competitive market dominated by large, integrated health care firms....

The problem of the relationship between actors and the social structures in which they are embedded is central to sociological theory. This paper suggests that the "new institutionalist" focus on fields, domains, or games provides an alternative view of how to think about this problem by...

"New Institutional" theories have proliferated across the social sciences. While they have substantial disagreements, they agree that institutions are created to produce local social orders, are social constructions, fundamentally about how powerful groups create rules of interaction and...

This paper investigates the effect of founder professional education background on the adoption of the open-science technology management strategy by a sample of 512 young biotechnology firms. One major finding of the paper is that after controlling for founder prior work experience and other...

The 2007-2009 financial crisis was centered on the nonconventional mortgage industry. Scholars have just begun to carefully consider what really caused the crisis. This paper pushes the debate forward in several ways. First, we elucidate four different theoretical approaches, "financialization",...

We discuss an emerging employment system characterized by a high degree of employment security with flexible job assignments, employee involvement in problem solving and continuous improvement, and continuous training of employees. We call this model the SET system (for Security, Employee...